French school students explain why they are organising blockades of their schools and the brutality they have faced from the French police.

Cross-posted from Counterfire

Picture by Wyslijp16

Below are speeches made at an international briefing organised by Informations Ouvrières

Context & beginning of the movement

K., Student in ENS (École Normale Supérieur), Paris

The movement started on Monday (28 September) in several high schools in Val-de-Marne, one of three small departments in Île-de-France that form a ring around Paris, known as the Petite Couronne (“inner ring”). High-schoolers protested against their poor learning conditions and budget inequalities. The next day, there was a national mobilisation day in support of the public services, initiated by firefighters, and many of the high-schoolers across the country decided to join the Val-de-Marne high-schoolers by organising blockades – around 400 high schools were blocked out of the 3,700 in France. The movement kept rising, and on Tuesday, around 900 high schools were blocked.

University students joined the mobilisation and blocked 40 campuses, in support of high-schoolers, to protest against police violence towards minors and to express shared demands.

The demands

The overall focus of the movement is the government’s attacks upon public services, and especially education. The upcoming vote on the budget sparked these protests.

- Inequalities between high schools

Addressing inequalities are a key demand of the movement, as highlighted by both students from ‘disadvantaged high schools’ as well as those from elite, renowned Parisian high schools. Indeed, suburban/rural high schools are strikingly more concerned with the following issues. PISA 2026 results highlight France’s terrible management of social inequalities, that are maintained by the French education system.

- Dilapidated state of high schools

Some videos were shared on social media in which students and teachers showed the lack of chairs and desks, unfixed leakages that force them to put buckets in their classrooms, no replacement of broken windows, collapsed ceilings, broken elevators that were never repaired, etc.

Cockroaches and rats are frequently seen inside the schools, even in more privileged high schools.

A student in Saint-Exupéry testified that the toilets in the prefabs had no water. Other high-schoolers protested against the lack of toilet paper, soap, and sanitary products for menstruation.

Even according to the Ministry of national education, 10% of high schools are affected.

On top of that, the vast majority of these facilities – some of which are described as dilapidated or in a state of disrepair – are not equipped to handle heatwaves. Consequently, in late June, more than 1,350 primary and middle schools had to close due to an exceptional heatwave.

- Insufficient staff and unfilled teaching posts

Students are pointing out unfilled teaching positions, such as a lack of a deputy head, lack of a director of vocational and technological training, lack of school nurses, and lack of staff to support pupils with disabilities (AESH).

According to a survey by the teachers’ union SNES-FSU, at least one teacher is missing in 53% of middle and high schools. In addition to teachers, public middle and high schools are facing shortages of other staff members, according to the same union. Their annual survey conducted in early September revealed that 69% of schools had incomplete teaching and educational support teams, lacking personnel such as teachers, senior educational advisors, supervisors (AEDs), special needs assistants (AESHs), nurses, or National Education psychologists.

Nearly 50,000 students with disabilities were left without a special needs assistants at the start of the 2025 school year, and the situation likely worsened in 2026.

- Absurdly long school days

Students also protested against their schedules. Their classes start at 8am and end at 6pm, leaving them with little to no rest or time for hobbies.

- Parcoursup

Parcoursup, the platform for pre-registration for the first year of higher education in France is also at the heart of the protests. The Parcoursup system creates pernicious competition, which accentuates social inequalities and distress or mental health issues among students. Continuous assessment is now more important than the Baccalauréat, leading to striking differences between social origins and high schools. For example, a student of Henri IV, which is known to be the best public school in France, will likely be assured to study in elite universities or “grande école”, unlike a student of Saint-Exupéry in Créteil.

Around 10% of high school students were not accepted into any higher education program, even though they had passed their Baccalauréat. That’s around 170,000 students.

This is interwoven with the question of militarisation, as students with no affectation are pressured to join special defence class, or the military itself. PISA 2025 results allow the government to tell young students that they have a bad education, that they won’t have any allocation on Parcoursup, and that even with good grades, what is left for them is joining the military.

Demands of university students

University students support the demands of high school students. They are also protesting against the rise of tuition fees, especially for foreign students, which is a racist government measure. Additionally, they are protesting against the suppression of housing assistance for students and against the reduction in the higher education and research budget, driving universities to look for private partnerships, often with defence companies.

Privileged high schools support

It is noteworthy that students in elite/privileged high schools have also joined the movement, calling for a redistribution of financial resources, along with a general increase of the budget allocated to public education.

Some of the most prestigious higher education institutions in France have joined the mobilisations, such as the École normale supérieure, ENS.

This illustrates a rare and, in a sense, unprecedented alliance between the youth of impoverished neighbourhoods and the country’s most privileged youth.

The brutality of the crackdown

C., student in Nanterre

The brutality of the crackdown on the secondary school students’ movement is indicative of the kind of repression Macron has been imposing on young people for the past 10 years, albeit on a completely different scale today. The secondary school blockades are being met with police violence that takes us back to the Yellow Vests movement of 2018.

In the last week, more than 5,000 arrests have been made of secondary-school pupils aged between 13 and 18, 80 per cent of whom are minors. And it has already been reported that around 170 students have been seriously injured by the police. One secondary school student lost the use of his right eye following a direct hit from a rubber bullet. Another suffered a double fracture to the jaw and the loss of his teeth after being hit by a rubber bullet from a distance of less than 3 metres. A plain-clothes police officer arrested a secondary school student near a river before holding his head under water. There have been cases of strangulation during arrests, for example involving a 14-year-old girl who could no longer breathe.

The violence is not limited to secondary school pupils, but it escalates when young people are left alone to face the police. Whether they are teachers, parents, trade unionists or elected representatives, everyone has been subjected to violence. I went to various roadblocks with several trade unionists to form a safety cordon between the police and the students, alongside teachers and parents. We were tear-gassed on numerous occasions; we were targeted with rubber bullets and faced police charges. At one point, the police positioned a sniper on a rooftop with a rubber bullet launcher, who was aiming at us with his finger on the trigger in a flat-trajectory shot position – which is normally prohibited.

The roads were not blocked by the police so there was a constant risk of young people being hit by cars. During the tear gas attacks, crowd movements gave way to scenes of chaos caused by police repression. Law and order enforced in a brutal, bloodthirsty manner. The BAC, an anti-crime brigade with its origins in repression in the French colonies and now notorious for its violence in working-class neighbourhoods – areas known as police testing grounds – turned up at the perimeter of the school blockades with balaclavas and no way to identify them, provoking violence between the school pupils and the police.

We witnessed the presence of the BRAV-M, a unit of ultra-violent police officers who conduct manhunts on motorbikes, batons in hand, criss-crossing the narrow alleyways and knocking over students. This unit had been disbanded following the murder of a student, Malik Oussekine, in 1986, but was subsequently reinstated by the French President, Emmanuel Macron.

All this violence has prompted warnings from major NGOs such as Amnesty International and the Human Rights League. The Magistrates’ Union, a professional union representing French magistrates within the judicial system, has condemned the “brutal response” to “the legitimate anger of secondary school pupils”with “the use of tear gas, violent arrests and disabling non-lethal weapons”. The magistrates criticise Gérald Darmanin, former Minister of the Interior and current Minister of Justice, for failing to pursue a “de-escalation strategy”. Quite the contrary.

So on the one hand, we have institutional state violence perpetrated by the police, which is simply a continuation of the social violence that young people have long endured; and on the other, we have media violence. Indeed, the media, unsurprisingly, have paraded the government’s official line. On every television news programme, they have focused on the property damage, completely glossing over the protesters’ demands and the state’s sole response: repression against the school pupils.

According to ACRIMED, a media monitoring organisation, France 2, the national public news channel, devoted 75 per cent of its airtime to the violence and property damage and only 8 per cent to the protesters’ demands. The rest of the time was focused on demonising the only progressive party that supports young people and opposes repression: La France Insoumise. For several days now, we have been told repeatedly that it is La France Insoumise that is manipulating and fuelling the school blockades, thereby implying that the pupils are not old enough to organise themselves independently with their own demands. And it’s the same on every TV channel!

‘Hands off our young people: elected representatives and activists from La France Insoumise, step in wherever you can’ – this is the very clear stance of Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s movement, to stand alongside the school pupils to protect them as much as possible from repression. Take Bally Bagayoko, the LFI mayor of Saint-Denis, a town on the outskirts of Paris, who, alongside the students, was cheered by the crowd and used his position as mayor to prevent repression by physically standing between the students and the police; he has been visiting the students’ blockades in Saint-Denis over the last few days. In response, government supporters proposed this week, and I quote, “a ban on La France Insoumise”.

As Jean-Luc Mélenchon rightly said, “It’s a way for them to avoid dealing with the problem. They’re acting as if there were no problem at all.” Indeed, banning La France Insoumise will do nothing to solve the problem; it will not result in more teachers, doors on school toilets, the renovation of school buildings, or the scrapping of Parcoursup… That is why Jean-Luc Mélenchon has also called for mass participation in the various demonstrations organised by secondary school pupils and students on Tuesday 6 October – demonstrations which have already received the support and backing of numerous teachers’ unions and, beyond that, of the CGT trade union confederation and even parents of pupils.

The secondary school pupils’ demands are political and coincide with the new state budget, which provides for 54 billion euros in further cuts to public services, with young people as the primary target. This includes the loss of 1,588 teaching posts and a reduction of more than 800 million euros in education funding – the largest cut in this budget. This is why the secondary school pupils’ demands are aligned with those of university students and workers, in opposition to the Macron-Lecornu budget and the austerity measures they once again seek to impose on a population that has already had enough. It is on this basis that the movement intends to continue with the support of the labour movement.

Generalisation

A., student in Grenoble

Since the beginning of the mobilisation, more and more supporters have been going out to protect high schoolers and allow them to maintain their blockades. Education staff and trade unionists, elected officials and LFI activists have gone out their way to be in front of the high schools to defend the students. The presence, mobilisation and most of all involvement of adults, trade unionists and workers in the movement allowed not only for a reduction in repression but also to keep the movement going.

We have seen it in the city of Nantes human chains formed to protect high school demonstrations. In some cities where the repression grows harsher, school staff ensure the doors of their establishments remain open to allow students to fall back and organise through general assemblies, safe from anti-crowd and riot control forces whereas we have seen other schools organising lock-outs of students.

In some establishments we have even seen teachers and staff striking in support of high-schoolers. I will now read the declaration of teachers from a city in the south west of France who have gone on strike:

“The protest unfolded calmly, high-schoolers sang, waved flags, and shot firecrackers in the air. None of us witnessed any sign of degradation, nor aggressivity against staff, or in the direction of the police. Between 8h30 and 9h15 am, police officers equipped themselves slowly and got on the move. Seeing this, high school staff positioned itself in a human cord between the angle of the cathedral and the town hall. We can testify that at no moment has any projectile flown over our heads, neither stones nor fireworks. Any contrary affirmation would be a lie. We attest that it is the police’s intervention that has caused the disorder and that has put our students in danger by having them run on roads that have not been closed to traffic and thus not secured. Today, we would like to express the educative team’s feeling of astonishment in regard to the use of violence of which we and our students have been victims of. The staff, who are gathered here today, vote in favour of the strike by a very significant majority to expose police violence and express their support to the students. We demand the prefecture to deny the narrative about yesterday’s events in order to distinguish the two days of mobilisation, re-establish the truth and the trust in the institution’s word.”

Last Friday, unable to answer to the demands, the National Education ministry decided to have classes be held online, and for classes to go back to normal progressively hoping the movement will die out by impeding the organisation of the high-schoolers. This solution not only isn’t one, it is a new problem teachers have to be facing alone. They now not only have to ensure the teaching of their students, but at the same time make sure they have access to the resources for the classes, face unstable internet connection of some households and so on.

University students have also seen a bunch of cuts. Housing grants cuts, inscription fees rises, cuts in general. In Rennes, students gathered in a general assembly of 2,000. Faculties all around France have been blocked in support of the high-schoolers’ protests.

Because of all this, we have seen the rise of a day of protest. The 6th of October. This day is the result of a global state of astonishment shared by all parts of society towards the events that unfolded last week. High-schooler parent associations, caring for the teaching and wellbeing of their children call for this date. Teachers’ unions have been the first to call for it, but we didn’t have to wait for long until university teachers’ unions joined in. This was followed by unions of all scales: local, county, regionals. It all led up to the general trade unions to call for this mobilisation, CGT, FO, Solidaires… Today, we can’t count all the trade unions that have joined in: health workers, rail workers, public services. We might think they have nothing to do with all this, but all those sectors are subject to the same budget cuts we have been talking about.

In this context, unions have been going out of their way to give students all the tools they might need: premises to organise in safely, supplies, megaphones, etc.

It is giving them the tools to organise, to convey their demands and see them through to the end themselves, without having repression forcing them to give up.

We can’t allow for high-schoolers to be left alone, isolated in the face of repression if we want their demands to be really heard.

Only the organised workers’ movement can support the high-schoolers’ movement to go through.

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